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After a full generation of constructivist thought, after close to a decade of Internet construction and nearly as long a period of activity at ebr/altx, we're ready to put an end to the construction of periodical issues. Instead of working within an unconsidered paradigm inherited from print media, the ebr editors intend to construct our own ends, over time and on terms that we set for ourselves (within the constraints of the web environment).

end construction

Jacob Edmond argues that while postmodernism might be useless as a theoretical concept or periodization, it nevertheless illuminates changes, both local and global, in the final decades of the twentieth century. Edmond analyzes the uses of postmodernism in the United States, New Zealand, Russia, and China. He shows how the various and even contradictory uses of the term postmodernism allowed it to represent both sides in the unfolding tension between globalization and localism in late twentieth-century culture.

While describing the work of Beckett as deeply influenced by nominalism, Holly Phillips explores “ineffable permutations of intellectual history” and demonstrates how medieval philosophy has deeply influenced twentieth century literature. Simultaneously, Phillips undermines the idea that nominalism’s dismantlement of universals has finally been accomplished by postmodernism.

Simon During proposes to unravel the “layered” history of postmodernism in New Zealand. In so doing, the author of this essay treats postmodernism as “an event rather than a period” and describes postmodernism’s development in the epoch of neo-liberalism.

In an attempt to re-materialize postmodernism, Damien Gibson provides, by drawing on material ecocriticism and on the concept of “narrative agency,” a critical posthumanist reading of Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods.

In this essay, Neil Vallelly answers the question “What is postmodernism?” by demonstrating how disappearance, as envisaged by Jean Baudrillard, “lies at the heart of postmodern theory.” Vallelly also argues for the critical value of postmodernism’s traces in contemporary literature and suggests the adoption of a “methodology that embraces disappearance.”

Dunedin, home of the University of Otago, facing the Pacific on the southeast corner of the South Island of New Zealand, used to be far from everywhere - if not exactly the end of the world, then (as they say) you could it see from there. Nowadays, of course, it is as close to everywhere as anywhere else, and much closer than some places, wired into the world-wide web and served by online forums of intellectual life such as the ebr.

Lance Newman suggests Ecocriticism shares a problematic assumption with “green” capitalism: the idea “a livable future will result from billions of individual ethical decisions.” Here he traces a burgeoning critical alternative that investigates the historical connections between global capital and the shifting structures of the “ecosocial.”

Contrasting conventional notions of representational realism with the leaps of imagination underlying contemporary physics, Sean Miller explores the necessary role of an imaginary in sting theorists’ search for a coherent “theory of everything.”

John Bruni evaluates current proposals for animal rights and green capitalism, questioning whether the legal and economic discourse with which the question of animal life as thus far been bound up will ever allow us, as Cary Wolfe proposes, to think past ourselves.

This new thread, edited by Henry Turner and introduced by Joseph
Tabbi, presents in short order what scholars today in the field of
literature, science, and the arts are reading and viewing. Some of the
citations appear online, and by ‘enfolding’ these references, ebr
intends to build a profile of the field as it evolves, available toebr readers for further annotation and construction.

There has never been a ‘Best of the electronic book review’ or a print collection. After ten full years of online publication, ebr has devised other ways of marking time, using techniques available in the same electronic media where the work first appeared. Here the editor presents an initial ‘Gathering’ of ebr essays, pulled from each of the journal’s threads to date.

Jokes play a fundamental role in Slavoj Žižek’s philosophizing. Is Žižek joking when he extols the virtues of Christianity to the Left? Eric Dean Rasmussen analyzes Žižek’s pro-Christian proselytizing as attacks on modes of PC-ness - political correctness and perverse Christianity - that sustain an undesirable neoliberalism.

In the fall of 1997, with the launch of ebr version 2.0, ebr editors Anne Burdick and Joseph Tabbi introduced a weaving metaphor to describe the journal interface. Three years later, Burdick sent in the following proposal for ebr 3.0, an entirely new version that enacts the metaphor using database technology.